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November 2005 - Posts

Wednesday, November 30, 2005 8:56 PM

Excel Services part 11: Excel Server, SharePoint, and dashboards

One thing that we hear from customers is that they would like to be able to re-use Excel spreadsheets in web portals and dashboards simply and without needing to write a bunch of custom code. For example, they have business people (financial analysts,
Posted by David Gainer | 9 Comments
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Tuesday, November 29, 2005 9:57 AM

Excel Services part 10: Data Connection Libraries, or connecting to databases made easy, manageable, and secure

In the past few posts I have talked about all the work we have done to make managing, sharing, and securing your Excel workbooks better using SharePoint and Excel Services. Today, I am going to cover a new feature that provides management, sharing, and
Posted by David Gainer | 14 Comments
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Wednesday, November 23, 2005 4:45 PM

Excel Services part 9: Controlling and protecting spreadsheets continued ...

Yesterday I discussed one of the main security mechanisms for spreadsheets saved to SharePoint - the View Item right - that guarantees users will only be able to view a spreadsheet on the server and not download it to the client. Today I will cover how
Posted by David Gainer | 3 Comments
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Tuesday, November 22, 2005 5:16 PM

Excel Services part 8: Controlling and protecting spreadsheets

To this point in my discussion of Excel Services, I have written primarily about the user-facing part of Excel Services - all the things customers can do with Excel Web Access and Excel Web Services in order to execute and interact with workbooks on the
Posted by David Gainer | 1 Comments
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Monday, November 21, 2005 2:01 PM

Excel Services part 7: Sample application with Excel Web Services

Last week I gave an overview of Excel Web Services and the types of scenarios these web services will enable. This post, I would like to show you an example. Let’s look at implementing a browser-based mortgage calculator. The application is simple, but
Posted by David Gainer | 14 Comments
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Friday, November 18, 2005 9:55 AM

Quick detour – cool things on the status bar and great-looking charts

Today I decided to take a quick break from Excel Services to talk about a few small but useful changes that have been made to the status bar and show off a few charts First, the status bar Zoom control - we have added a slider that allows the user to
Posted by David Gainer | 28 Comments
Thursday, November 17, 2005 9:20 AM

Excel Services part 6: Building applications with Excel Web Services

While talking about scenarios for Excel Services, I mentioned “Reusing the logic encapsulated in Excel spreadsheets in custom applications” – which means accessing spreadsheets and their contents server-side via web services in a way that’s scalable and
Posted by David Gainer | 15 Comments
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Wednesday, November 16, 2005 10:30 AM

Excel services part 5: all about “interactivity”

Now that I have discussed publishing spreadsheets to Excel Services, let’s review how users can “interact” with spreadsheets that Excel Services has generated. To start, I want to explain what we mean by “interact” because it is anther development-team
Posted by David Gainer | 8 Comments
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Friday, November 11, 2005 3:56 PM

How do I publish workbooks to the server?

Now that I have spent some time talking about goals and architecture, I want to spend some time talking about the features provided by Excel Services, starting with how you get a spreadsheet on a server in the first place. There are two ways to get a
Posted by David Gainer | 16 Comments
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Thursday, November 10, 2005 9:26 AM

Excel Services - Architecture

Before I continue to drill down on the features of Excel Services, I would like to explain the architecture at a high level and touch on configuration possibilities. Excel Services is built on the SharePoint products and technologies platform. There are
Posted by David Gainer | 14 Comments
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Wednesday, November 09, 2005 10:10 AM

Excel Services – Key Scenarios

We targeted three scenarios for this initial release of the product (note – “scenario” is development-team speak for “what we expect customers will want to do with a set of features in a product”). Sharing spreadsheets through the browser Building business
Posted by David Gainer | 11 Comments
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Tuesday, November 08, 2005 12:38 PM

Introduction to Excel Services, or “running Excel spreadsheets on a server”

Back in September, I posted an article on the big picture which mentioned that we are creating an all-new “Excel Services” server technology as part of our Excel 12 work. Some of you may have caught a glimpse of Excel Services being demonstrated as part
Posted by David Gainer | 24 Comments
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Monday, November 07, 2005 11:43 AM

Tables Part 7: Good-looking, well-behaved table formatting made easy …

If you’ve been reading the last few posts on tables, you may have noticed that the screenshots all had tables with formatting applied to the entire table. You may have thought I spent lots of time manually formatting the tables to look nice for this blog
Posted by David Gainer | 12 Comments
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Friday, November 04, 2005 3:13 PM

Tables Part 6: Removing duplicates from tables (and ranges) of data

Being able to remove duplicate rows of information from a table of data is a request we hear fairly often from our customers (and one of the top questions in the comments in this blog). Some users know that this capability exists in Excel today; unfortunately
Posted by David Gainer | 17 Comments
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Thursday, November 03, 2005 2:21 PM

Multi-threaded calculation in Excel, or “how calculation can become much faster in Excel 12”

One of the things I mentioned in my overview of Excel 12 post in September was that we had done some work to speed up calculation on modern hardware (multi-processor or dual-core chips). I thought I would take a brief break from tables to summarize that
Posted by David Gainer | 14 Comments
Wednesday, November 02, 2005 4:42 PM

Tables Part 5: Everything you wanted to know about sorting in Excel 12

I mentioned in my previous post that the three-condition limit on sorting (Data|Sort) has been removed in Excel 12. As someone correctly pointed out in a comment many posts ago, this means the current sort dialog has changed in Excel 12. Here’s what the
Posted by David Gainer | 17 Comments
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Tuesday, November 01, 2005 3:30 PM

Tables Part 4: AutoFilter improvements: much more than just multi-select …

Sorting and filtering are two of the most important types of basic analysis that you can do with data. In Excel 12, we have improved sort and filter functionality to better expose common tasks, to make key tasks simple, and to enable scenarios that were
Posted by David Gainer | 16 Comments
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